Writing the platform

Writing a platform for a city council run is a daunting task. My expertise is in affordable housing, but City Council covers most aspects of city administration. I had an idea of the general points to touch on, and I had a wishlist of affordable housing items to add to a platform — essentially everything I've been advocating for for the past year and a half — but other areas required a more legwork, Googling, and a never-ending stream of conversations with people around the city. In general, I found that a good way to vet specific ideas is to pass it by a few older residents, especially those that pay attention to politics. ("So, Mr. Smith, don't you think the corner of High Street and Main would be a great spot for a restaurant?" — "Well, you'd think so, but there's no parking there and the bus is always stopping by — besides, an insurance company owns the building, so it'd never work..." etc. etc.)

I don't want to overpromise. This is a pitfall that, I think, first-time progressive candidates often fall into: writing a wishlist of social services without any idea of how to pay for them. Medford's most significant problem, in my view, is affordable housing; a close — though very interrelated — second-most-significant problem is lack of money. This is partially the result of decades of tax cuts and lack of growth in the city (which a City Councilor, given enough will and support, can help with over a number of years) and partially a result of the state of the overall economy (which one City Councilor can do very little about). Voters, especially those that have been around the block a few times, can also sniff out this sort of overpromising. Medford's teachers would love to get paid more, but they would also love to know where a candidate plans to get the money from.

Some platform points cost literally nothing. But, because they affect a relatively small number of residents, relevant legislation may not have yet found its way onto the City Council agenda. For instance, in my conversations prior to announcing a City Council run, I eventually found my way to Bay Staters Massachusetts, a group that's focused on decriminalizing psychedelics for therapeutic uses. I'd never used psychedelics, but I have a PhD that largely focused on neuroscience, so I wasn't totally ignorant about the issue. I looked up a few peer-reviewed studies on the issue and found that there was evidence that psychedelics had little, if any, long-term effects, and they could help treat PTSD. Somerville and Cambridge had also decriminalized it in recent years, and our own state senators and representatives were sponsoring bills to decriminalize them statewide. So I wrote the policy into my platform.

For the most part, platform points required conversations and extensive collaborations with longterm residents of Medford and surrounding areas. The most helpful person in this respect was a longtime activist in the community and public housing resident. He reached out to me early and became a vital resource in designing the platform. We didn't agree on every point of what ought to go into it, but our conversations provided a level of depth to the underlying proposals that I would never have been able to come up with on my own, particularly in areas related to economic development. He was also able to offer his own inputs on who I should talk to about which issues. In particular, the environmental platform points were something that I personally knew very little about. He recommended that I reach out to a city councilor in Cambridge, MA who had a serious, Green-New-Deal set of proposals, which a local city council could feasibly implement. This was one of the more successful conversations I had — though I was conscious that Medford had less revenue than Cambridge, which was a lens that I constantly viewed these conversations through (I was particularly cognizant of this when thinking over an entry-level green jobs training program, though collaborations with Bunker Hill would make this feasible in the immediate term).

Charter review was a tricky platform point to navigate as well. Medford's Charter is its governing document that dictates how the city is run — the number of city councilors, whether representation should be at-large or ward-based, whether we have a strong or weak mayoral system, and so on. It's the issue that's least understood by voters, but also one of the most important for the long-term health of the city. These systems dictate the incentives behind many of our elected officials. We have two-year terms for the mayor and city councilors; this means that elected officials are constantly campaigning, but it also means that they're more accountable to the voters. At-large representation means that, if 20 voters from South Medford voice concerns about a particular building project, each councilor is concerned about losing 20 votes. This would not be the case for a ward-based or mixed representation system. That's just one narrow example.

I had been deeply involved in Charter Review efforts and strongly believed that Medford's Charter needed to be reviewed. Even if nothing related to governance needed to be changed, it was just poorly written, defaulting to state law in many cases. In 2022, the Mayor instituted a Charter Review Study Committee, which was tasked with studying the issue and incorporating expert and public feedback, that I served on before stepping down to campaign. I had my own opinions about how the Charter ought to be changed, but I also don't want to be an elected official that rejects expert and public feedback in favor of my own inclinations, and, having worked with the people on the Study Committee, I believe that they will do a thorough job in the future. So my platform ended up largely stating that I would vote for whatever they recommended, even if the proposals contained, for instance, redistricting proposals that hurt my electoral chances in the future.

In summary, I had to talk to experts, I had to talk to people around the community, and I had to give myself enough time to develop it. It’s not the work of an individual; it’s a set of concrete concrete ideas that a community can get behind.